August 9 & 10

Saturday & Sunday

10 AM - 6 PM

Class Size Max: 6

The platinum print is perhaps the most subtly beautiful and most permanent of all photographic printing processes. Its delicate chiaroscuro conveys a realness or presence unobtainable with other processes. Air becomes visible, cool shadows recede from the viewer, and light travels between objects. Here is unique opportunity to learn from a true master. Lois Conner has been making platinum prints since 1974. Since 1982, she has been teaching the process in New York City and across the country, including a 2021 platinum workshop at Yale University, where she taught from 1991-2000.

This intensive workshop explores the technical and aesthetic aspects of platinum printing, with references to the history of the platinotype from its invention in 1878 by William Willis in England. The class will look at original prints from a range of artists, including some of the early practitioners of the medium. Its proliferation in the contemporary world will be part of the conversation. Hand sensitizing the paper with salts of iron and platinum and palladium is both exciting and thrilling. A broad range of papers will be considered. By the end of this course, students will have the knowledge and skills to make competent and beautiful platinum prints as well as a good grasp of the chemistry involved, and how to troubleshoot its myriad of potential problems.

$225 material fee included in tuition

LOIS CONNER is known for her large-scale panoramic photographs. She has received numerous grants, exhibits widely, and her work is featured in many esteemed publications. Most recently, Conner received the Pollock-Krasner Award for Artists (2020) and the Rosenkranz Foundation Fellowship for Photography (2019). She was awarded the Anonymous Was a Woman Fellowship (2007), and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1984), the New York State Council on the Arts (1983) and the National Endowment of the Arts (1979). Conner’s work is currently on view in 150 years of Women at Yale University Art Gallery and is part of the traveling exhibition Civilization, The Way We Live Now in Australia, New Zealand and France (2020-2021). She exhibited in the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (2020). Conner has had numerous solo shows in Asia and the United States. Her work was featured in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012 and 2017) and in the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010). Recent books include Lotus, Trees and the Jiangnan Landscape, Hangzhou (2019), A Long View, Shanghai Center of Photography (2018), and Lotus Leaves, Wairarapa Academy, New Zealand (2018). Conner has been teaching photography for over thirty-five years and is currently a visiting artist at Fordham University. She taught at the Yale University School of Art for more than a decade, and at other institutions including Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Cooper Union, Bard College, Stanford University, the New School, the School of Visual Arts and the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China.

Images © Lois Conner

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